With the increasing popularity of the Internet and other content-heavy electronic communication systems, there has been a substantial need for reliable and affordable high bandwidth mediums for facilitating data transmissions between service providers and their customers. In relation to the requirement that such mediums be affordable to consumers, a cost-effective manner for providing service to customers involves using infrastructure already present in most locations. Accordingly, over recent years, the two such mediums most widely meeting these requirements include cable television (CATV) and conventional copper wire telephone systems (plain old telephone system or POTS).
Relating specifically to the adaptation of POTS telephone lines to carry data at high-bandwidth or “broadband” data rates, a number of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) standards and protocols have been proposed. DSL essentially operates by formatting signals using various Time Domain Equalization techniques to send packets over copper wire at high data rates. An offshoot of conventional DSL is Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) and is considered advantageous for its ability to provide very high data rates in the downstream (i.e., from service provider to the user) direction by sacrificing speed in the upstream direction. Consequently, end user costs are minimized by providing higher speeds in the most commonly used direction. Further, ADSL provides a system that applies signals over a single twisted-wire pair that simultaneously supports conventional POTS or Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) service as well as high-speed duplex (simultaneous two-way) digital data services.
DSL is the fastest growing among emerging broadband technologies for very good reasons. First of all, DSL utilizes the existing copper wire network infrastructure. Secondly, compared to the voice modems, such as V.34 and V.90, used in most personal computers that provide up to 56 kbps dial-up connection, DSL provides a high bandwidth, always-on connection with typical connection speeds from 384 kbps to 6 Mbps and higher. Moreover, DSL is affordable with easy installation, simple turn-up, and high service reliability. The successful deployment of DSL is capable of providing digital broadband connection to anyone with an analog telephone line.
DSL services have been standardized over time by regional organizations such as, American National Standard Institute (ANSI), European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI), and by world telecommunication organization International Telecommunication Union (ITU). For example, proposed standards for ADSL are set forth by the International Telecommunications Union, Telecommunication Standardization Section (ITU-T). A first, conventional, ADSL standard is described in ITU-T Recommendation G.992.1—“Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) Transceivers”, the body of which is incorporated herein by reference. A second, more recently proposed standard is the G.992.2 or ‘G.lite’ standard, further described in ITU-T Recommendation G.992.2—“Splitterless Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) Transceivers”, also incorporated by reference herein. The G.lite standard is a variant of the G.992.1 standard, with modifications directed primarily to work in a splitterless environment (i.e., without a splitter at the remote user end to separate the voice traffic from the digital data traffic).
These DSL standards define data communication protocols to connect customer premise equipment (CPE) to the central office (CO) and to provide connections to various networks, such as DSL service providers, virtual private networks (VPN), or the Internet. Various forms of digital data (e.g., voice, video, and data) can be transported using DSL technology. For transport of voice, DSL equipment is connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). For transport of video and data, DSL equipment uses the Internet via an Internet service provider (ISP). Voice over DSL (VoDSL) is capable of providing computer-to-computer, computer-to-telephone, and telephone-to-telephone voice services using an integrated access device (IAD). Video over DSL includes transport of data in various formats, including, e.g., MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 files, video conferencing using Internet Protocol (IP) standard such as ITU H.323, WebCam, and video mail. In addition, DSL supports simple data transport, e.g., bearer services, for virtual private network (VPN), leased data line such as T1 and E1, Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and Internet Protocol (IP).
Like other communication technologies, DSL has gone though a major evolution over the last decade and a collection of technologies, commonly referred to as xDSL, are developed under the umbrella of DSL. One type of subscriber loop digital transmission technology involves an integrated services digital network (ISDN), which has replaced a significant portion of the analog phone lines in Europe and Japan. ISDN offers integrated voice and data services and connection speed up to 144 kbps. Due to the high cost of deployment, an alternative solution called integrated digital loop carrier (IDLC) was deployed in United States. However, resulting data rates were considered inadequate for individual customers. As a result, advanced DSL technologies were developed including HDSL, SDSL, ADSL, HDSL2, SHDSL, and VDSL, all of which are capable of connection speed in excess of 1 Mbps. These advanced DSL technologies were developed to address different needs and application demands, while serving different market segments. For example, SHDSL is a symmetric service designed for long reach office applications with connection speed of 1.5 Mbps, whereas, VDSL is designed to provide a very high-speed asymmetric service for a short-range applications.
DSL systems achieve high bit rates due to an effective application of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques which are enabled by advances in DSP algorithm design and VLSI design, which provides tools to physically implement these techniques and corresponding algorithms. Among the various techniques designed for communication applications, Discrete MultiTone (DMT) provides bit rates close to a maximum achievable level. In fact, due to this property and other properties, DMT has been elected as the line coding technique for the international ADSL standard.
DMT technique deals with the linear distortion caused by channel spread where the channel is divided into smaller channels with no channel spread, thereby minimizing distortion. However, the length of allowable channel spread is limited by a symbol prefix length used by the DMT system. In real life applications, however, the channel length is generally greater than the prefix length and further increases in length as the distance between the CO and the user increases. Therefore, a form of preprocessing received data is useful for shortening the effective channel length seen by the DMT receiver to a length less than or equal to the prefix length. The most common approach, known as Time domain Equalization (TEQ), is to apply a linear filtering to received data samples to shorten the effective channel spread.
In a typical DMT based modem, the TEQ filter is located after the receive filter and before the DMT receiver block. Given this structure, one major concern involves designing an optimal and efficient algorithm to optimize bit rate in DMT systems, such as DMT Quad spectrum systems. Ultimate optimization goal involves maximizing data communication rate of the DMT system. Therefore, it is desirable to develop techniques for achieving optimal bit rate for improved efficiency and overall performance.
Therefore, there is a need in the art of ADSL systems for a more efficient method and system for enhancing or optimizing bit rate in DMT systems.